China's healthcare business

Dr. Adam Powell and Dr. Youfa Wang, two of several presenters at this past weekend’s US-China Intercollegiate Healthcare Conference held on Wharton’s campus, exhibited a shared awe of the rapid changes taking place in China’s healthcare profile. Among the many themes and viewpoints presented at the conference, the sense of awe emerged as the common meeting point for all attendees.

“Just look at what China has been able to do,” Dr. Powell gushed while pointing at a chart depicting the staggering rise of insurance coverage in China from 2000 to 2012. The rate of China insurance coverage has reached 95%, according to the latest numbers put forth in this months March 2nd issue of medical journal the Lancet [link no longer exits]. “In ten years [Chinese health planners] have managed to cover a billion people.”

“Every time I visit China, I’m very surprised by the many changes,” Dr. Wang, a Johns Hopkins Medical School Professor and probably the leading expert on nutrition in China, said as he pointed at his own PowerPoint slide earlier in the day, a map depicting all of China’s KFC restaurant locations. The image made the audience of ninety students and health professionals chuckle and wiggle uncomfortably in their seats.

Yet for all the agreement on the pace of change in China, Dr. Shujun Li, the recently retired head of Beijing United Family Hospital’s surgery unit was still greeted with a roomful of approving nods when he pointed out that “the term ‘market’ does not fit to today’s situation” in the sphere of Chinese hospitals and clinics. Similarly, there was a rustling of pencil on paper and a clattering of laptop keys when keystone speaker Sheldon Dorenfest, CEO of the Dorenfest China Healthcare Group, said that in China’s broader healthcare sphere the market is not the private market. Rather, “the market is the public market.”

For some, one or both statements may seem confusing. Beijing United is one of China’s two largest, private for-profit hospital chains and it is foreign owned. Yet here we have one of its medical officers saying that despite all of this, a healthcare market in China is an illusion. The Health Statistics Yearbook 2011,put out by the Chinese Ministry of Health shows that there were 13,850 public hospitals in China in 2010, compared to 7,068 non-public hospitals, hardly numbers suggesting a non-existent private market.

Two key insights make sense of Dr. Li’s statement.

First, for the majority of Chinese, healthcare is only accessible with the aid of public insurance, so there is no private market to which they can turn for alternative, non-profit services. Moreover, the health institutions they can reasonably access are all regulated by the same price control mechanisms so almost all fees will be identical. Because they cannot choose between healthcare providers on the basis of any meaningful entities, they are not really a market consumer and for them there is no market. There is a strong argument to be made that a market exists when underground practices like red envelope payments are considered but that’s an article for another day.

Second, for those Chinese who can afford to look towards private healthcare providers they don’t really have 7,068 non-public hospitals and clinics from which to choose. The majority of these non-public healthcare “hospitals” are mom and pop healthcare businesses, like elective procedure providers and check-up centers, and dental offices, that offer little or no clinical services. For example, Beijing United is successful because no other non-public hospital in Beijing offers what it does: a full range of clinical and preventative services. So, even in the realm of non-public, i.e. ‘private’ hospitals and clinics, consumers really have no choice and therefore, in a sense, there is no market.

And the insights that explain Dr. Li’s statements are critical for understanding Mr. Dorenfest’s point on the existence of a public market only. The dominance of public entities in the healthcare market who admit patients, dispense drugs and purchase medical equipment, and the small size of the private healthcare market – and, again, the private healthcare market gets very small if you don’t count the mom and pop enterprises with little or no buying power – means that entrepreneurs have to work with public entities or risk failure by betting on a very short list of private market clients.

As a side note, I am not seriously positing that there is an absence of a healthcare market in China, per se. “The public market is the market,” to be sure, is not equivalent to “there is no market.” There are many things that can be done to operate profitably in a public market, and a public market is a form of market. A combination of pharma sales and hong bao are presently being used to circumvent price controls. Also, even though pricing may be fixed, hospitals may compete with each other to some extent for volume or case-mix (some procedures may be more desirable to perform than others). Further expounding on this point, if Beijing United is really the only hospital in its class as it claims, that does not mean there is no private market in Beijing – it means that Beijing United has a monopoly (a market with one dominant player). Beijing United likely monopolizes a small high-end niche market. Other Beijingers must make the choice between going to a myriad of specialty hospitals, TCM hospitals, village and county clinics, etc. Demand at these various places is determined by the choices of the Beijingers – a market exists.

Getting back to the point, however, the big lesson, which brings together both the points on dynamic change and public market dominance, is that investment in China’s healthcare market is a task which should not be taken lightly. Not only does the gravity of issues implicate — as conference presenter Michael Zakkour principal of Technomic Asia put it — “the future of China.” The complexity of the situation also demands of potential entrepreneurs in the area a sophisticated plan of action and not a ‘shortcut’ strategy which looks to cut out the complicated labyrinth of public institutions and ministries controlling the healthcare space. Mr. Dorenfest summed it all up with the last few words in his closing address, “Even though I was a very seasoned entrepreneur in the West, I was in preschool in doing business in China and had to learn more to be successful…[I]f I bought hospitals in China with what I knew about doing business in China I would be making bad investments be pouring money down the drain.”

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About China Law Blog

We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.